Here At The End
by IndigoJones
Summary: Stories about the crew of Rogue One before they meet, and at the end. Previously a one-shot, "To Lose One's Mind"
1. Bodhi

Bodhi

To Lose One's Mind

 _Are you mad, yet?_

The words returned to him first, out of the black. Sight came next, but slowly, and accompanied by a throbbing ache behind his eyes. When the swimming stains of color resolved into recognizable shapes, he saw only gray walls and a window like a cage. Prison. He was in prison. He was trying to defect, he must have been caught. _Are you mad?_ Why did he think he could defect? No one can leave the Empire. No one can betray the Emperor. No one can escape _him_.

Bodhi saw what the one they called Lord did to the rebel prisoners he was assigned to transport. He did not see a lord, he saw a monster, and realized that he had flown the prisoners straight into its jaws and brought them to a fate worse than death. Bodhi would not follow a monster.

 _He is Bodhi Rook and he is not mad._

So he defected. He did. He did escape. And yet he was in prison. The monster found him, after all, a man who was more machine than human, and he had set a creature on him. It slithered up and grasped his face and squeezed at his mind. _I believe you will find her._ And Bodhi was swallowed by a lifetime of words and images, all rushing through him and out of him, drowning him in their cacophony. Everything shattered and he was torn from himself, left without name or reason. The last thing he heard as he slid into the black were the monster's gasping words.

"It is done. So, you told the truth. Are you mad, yet?"

Once, on recon, he flew out to the furthest reaches of a system, so far out that he lost all sight of planets and stars. He was alone in the emptiness of space and its silence was infinite. There was no up, no down, no right or left. No path for him to follow. Nothing. He was alone and he was no one.

The darkness greyed and blurred, shapes and movements came in and out of focus. There were noises, and men. Men's voices drifting into his cage. He was not alone.

"Imperial pilot!"

 _Pilot._

 _You must deliver this message._

 _Are you mad?_

 _You must get the message to her._

 _How will I know her?_

"What does she look like?"

"She looks like her mother." Bodhi raised his shoulders in a helpless gesture and waited in silence as Erso rubbed the palm of his hand down his face. "I don't know, it's been so many years. Her hair was dark. It would curl around her face. Her eyes were blue, but green as well. And she was small, even for a child her age, she was such a little thing." Erso's voice tightened into a rasp, and Bodhi let his eyes slide away for a moment to give the other man a moment of privacy. "She will be with Saw Gerrera, or he will know how to find her. Go to Saw, and you will find Jyn."

"I will try," Bodhi replied. His gut churned with anxiety as the screams of the rebel prisoners echoed in his memory. The chances of him finding Galen Erso's missing daughter with the help of a rebel fighter, even if he did manage to survive defecting–

" _No._ You _must_ do this. You will escape. You will take this message and go to Saw Gerrera, and then you will find Jyn Erso, or she will find you. I would not ask it of you, Rook, if I did not believe you capable and trust you to do what is right." Erso's hands suddenly reached out and gently grasped Bodhi's face as if he was a child, lifting it upward so that their gazes locked. "I believe you will find her, and I believe you will help her." Bodhi was suddenly, strangely, calm. Now there was a path before him, and he could see it clearly.

"I will. I swear I will." Bodhi had made many promises before, all sworn to the Empire with necessary shouting and saluting, and now he was about to break them all. But this promise…this he could not break. This was something true. This he would never break. He felt the muscles in Erso's hands tighten around his face. The man nodded, smiled, and said a strange thing.

"May the Force be with you."

The prison walls crumbled and there were men calling to him as he scrambled to piece together the fragments of his mind. He ran with them (or he was pulled along, or pushed, he couldn't tell), into a ship, and then there was screaming, a terrible roaring of voices and engines and fire and earth rising up to swallow them all. And then, in the cold quiet of space, she was there. She found him. She was small, but not delicate. Her face was round and pale, and framed by a mess of dark hair. The eyes that met his were bright with a dangerous light. She held herself like a fighter, wary, and ready to strike. But her voice was clear and strong, and her words were true. Jyn Erso was a leader, and Bodhi Rook would follow her.

He hardly left her side from that moment on. Not just because he wanted to keep his promise to Galen to help her, but to help himself as well. Sometimes, without cause or warning, the dark nothingness crept back into him, and he would forget who he was or why he mattered. But whenever the black veil began to wrap around his mind, Bodhi locked his gaze onto her, and remembered. He recognized her every time. Her name appeared to him out of the void. _Jyn Erso. Galen Erso sent her a message with a pilot. I was the pilot._ And then the rest would return, his name, his past, and his purpose all surfaced from some murky depth, and all were drawn to her as if to a magnet. He would know her anywhere.

He wanted to tell her this, to explain why he was always staring at her, to apologize, or maybe to thank her, but these thoughts made him feel strange and inadequate. There were also stories about her father that he wished he could tell her, but words came to him slowly after the prison. He was never sure if he arranged them correctly, or if he was saying out loud the same words that were in his head, so he kept most of them to himself. Maybe, if they survived, if his mind recovered, if they had more time, he could tell her everything. He would tell her his own story, everything he knew about her father, about the path that brought them together. He would confess every awful thing he had done for the Empire. He would tell her about the rebel prisoners he took to Darth Vader, and he would ask her to forgive him. He would even admit that he sometimes imagined slowly tracing his finger over the curve of her upper lip, or tell her how very beautiful she was. But those thoughts confused and overwhelmed him, and words like that did not belong in war. If they had met in another time, in another place, maybe Bodhi could have said those things, but not here. So he listened and helped, and it was enough.

…

Something clattered onto the floor by his feet and he looked.

A grenade.

He knew, he knew.

He had always known. This was the path he chose for himself. They all chose it. None of them were getting out. But his message got through. Jyn could send the plans. She would. He knew she would. She had found him, after all. The path that brought him here had also led him to her. He would know her anywhere. He would follow her anywhere.

He hoped death was swift. Hers as well. He didn't want her to suffer. Cassian wouldn't let her suffer. He wished she could hear him now. He wanted to tell her –


	2. Jyn

Jyn

A Light at The End

She didn't cry alone in the dark, not the first time. She knew she had done what she was supposed to do: stay low, run, hide, stay quiet. And then wait. She knew Saw would come for her, and she had believed, then, that he would find her parents and bring them back to her. She hadn't realized that when she watched her mother fall, there would be no getting up again. Jyn had no reason to fear, but she had grown cold and lonely while hiding in the dark. Eventually Saw's face appeared in a halo of light and she climbed up into his warm arms, and then she was waiting, always waiting for him to bring Mother and Father back to her.

Hope erodes slowly in the young, and it took some time before Jyn believed Saw when he told her there was no going back; that her mother was gone forever, and she would only see her father if she was captured by the Imperials who would hurt her in ways she could not yet imagine. It was years, in fact, before she was truly convinced of this. Saw was there when the truth finally crashed over her, and he watched as her face crumpled and then split open in a voiceless cry. When she reached her little hands out to him for comfort he grabbed her wrist and pressed the handle of a knife into her palm. She opened her eyes in surprise and he pointed at the life-sized doll in Stormtrooper armor his soldiers used for target practice. There was a moment of hesitation as she shuddered, but then she leapt on the doll and slashed at it until it was in pieces. After she exhausted herself with violence, Saw gathered her to his chest and let her cry until she slept. Her hand remained clenched around the knife, and its blade gleamed bright in the darkness.

Several years later they were scavenging with a group in the mountains when the ground gave way under their feet and they all tumbled down the side of the hill amongst the sliding rocks and debris. All except Jyn, so much smaller than the rest, whose body slipped into a newly opened crevice in the mountainside. Her initial scream was swallowed up in the noise of the landslide, and when she hit the ground of the cave into which she had fallen the air was knocked from her lungs and she could only gasp as her limbs twitched helplessly. The ground shifted some more above her, and then she was in total darkness. This time no one was coming for her. Saw didn't know where she was, and no one else cared. She felt then that she would die alone in the dark, and for the first time wished that Saw had never come for her. Why hadn't he let her fade away as a child before she understood what death was and had time to think about the pain that awaited her? If he had just let her die _then_ she wouldn't be here _now_ , remembering that last day when her mother chose to die at her father's side instead of living by hers; how she had been left to run and hide in a hole like a dumb animal that only exists to be someone else's prey. Now she would be crushed below the mountains, her body reduced to a smear of blood and dust. Her mind continued to whirl downwards into despair, and by the time Saw found her again she was sobbing mindlessly. When he tried to lift her up she screamed and thrashed at his face with her fingernails until he sedated her so that she could be carried out. Jyn never spoke of it again, and Saw – usually so strict about supplies – never begrudged her the light she carried into her bunk every night.

…

She stared into the wave and smiled as she realized there would be no darkness for her ever again. The memory of her father's eyes rose in her mind, her mother's necklace pressed into her skin, and she was grateful that Saw came to find her. She thanked her friends for the time they had bought her, these last precious minutes, and wished she could see them again. Cassian's arms gathered her closer and she felt the beating of his heart against her chest. She held him with all of her strength. There was no fear now, only the hope that had carried them here, and the light.


End file.
